


Sequelae

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Depression, Episode Fix-it, F/M, Love, M/M, Multi, Other, PTSD Sherlock, Past Drug Use, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-The Sign of Three, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Negotiation, Romance, Spoilers, The Sign of Three, The Sign of Three Spoilers, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:59:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is, Sherlock's coming apart at the seams. He needs—he <i>needs</i>, but they can't <i>all</i> dance.</p><p>The truth is, they need just as much, just as desperately. The truth is, he hides far too well, and they're clever, they are, but they're blind: they're not him.</p><p>And the <i>truth</i> is: John and Mary don't <i>see</i> until it may be too damned late.</p><p> </p><p>  <b>Episode Spoilers for 3.02: The Sign of Three.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) and [ScienceofObsession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession) for encouraging this and suffering a few peeks at it as it developed; you're both lovely.

There are three patches.

Three patches, plastering the length of each forearm. He reaches, peels, places another at the crevice, the swell of the brachial pulse.

Seven in all. 

It’s slow. Tedious. His mind is untamed: viscous and innate. The buzzing in his ear feels heavy in his chest.

He closes his eyes.

Jewel toned lights.

The waltz; the notes he’d bent over, bent himself into, cacophonic: devout and deleterious, long into the night.

Shock. Fear. Joy. _All three of you_.

A vow to the known and the unknown, the breaking of a soul in the keeping of a promise.

The heart in Sherlock’s chest wrings itself awkwardly, a cruel grimace. The tips of Sherlock’s fingers dig hard, deep into the flesh of his arm, what’s left of it to see: dig to find blood, to find bone, to find proof that there is a still a life in him to squander—to give evidence beyond reasonable doubt that he is worth destroying, has not yet been entirely undone.

Red begins to bead his skin; it’s not sufficient.

He feels like inertia; like zero-Rankine: all atrophy and still. 

_Not an advantage._

But oh, to remember feeling before the fall: it’s a weakness, a weakness of his, and his palms are defiant, unsteady, as they glide across his cheeks.

Breathing is difficult, suddenly. He clenches his fist; releases: habit.

_Chemical defect._

The nicotine is slow, slow in seeping through his pores, his veins. He exhales, slow, deliberate: he is broken, he is wretched, he is unpleasant and unkind, this he knows.

This he has always known, and there are worse vices, he thinks; worse vices than taking all his shortcomings and masking them, repackaging those defects to a purpose with the use of just one more.

Just. One. More.

One more, unto the breaking, and then perhaps, just _perhaps_ —

_Losing side._

But he was always going to lose, he’s not so disillusioned; he’s not so much a fool. When he ran his finger over the engraving in John’s phone; etched the smile on John’s lips into the door frame of one room, all the rooms in the Palace like a brand, like a nameplate—when he leapt and took a risk for reasons that make his hands tremble, for truths he’d deleted save for everything they’ve done, everything they’ve left behind: the remnants that accumulate and rise up to consume.

When he saw the wine, and smelt the perfume. When he caught her eyes and read fascination, compassion, humour, grace off her body, off her mind.

He is loved. Not as he wants to be loved.

Selfish.

He loves. More than he thought himself capable; more than he believe the human mind could sustain with truth, with honest rapture and agony.

Idiot.

He is Sherlock Holmes.

He still doesn’t know what that means, but he knows what it entails.

He has always lived, always breathed, to lose.

His chest: taut like a garrote; sharp with each surge of pressure, bleed out.

Bleed out.

He reminds himself of the slipper beneath the sofa; reminds himself: _Alone protects._

He flicks the lighter on and off, ignores the slip of his finger as it misses, misses, shakes—

Ignites.

He reaches below for a cigarette; watches with macabre curiosity as his fingers fear to tread the curve, to hold it, and for all that he fought the maddening temptation to give in, give in, give _in_ to the four corners of the globe and the diagonals he’d drawn tenfold between, for all the trial and retribution of John’s disappointment, John’s disdain, John’s concern on the nights he felt loathing toward his own self most: for all that John’s voice kept the filter from his lip, his head is silent now.

His hand shakes; it takes a miracle, the smiting hand of a fairytale god to light the tip.

His eyes burn before the flame takes, before he watches it dance and burn. 

_Make it stop_ ; he blinks away the sound, the sight of John, of Mary before him, still fully dressed, still immaculate and beyond him, beyond his being and capacity to touch, beyond what he can be, what he can ever hope to offer: beyond him, and he scowls before he breathes in deep, lets the thickness consume him and mimic an embrace from the inside as his lungs die, belated.

Fitting, amidst what else had shriveled in his chest.

_Alone._

_Make it stop_ : and he envisions his bare skin and the stretch of his arm. He holds the limb tight, burns the skin at his wrist: barely flinches.

He remembers what it felt like to truly burn, and he needs it, he _needs_ it, and he wonders if he keeps his eyes closed, will it matter; will he remember the shape and twirl of his veins without looking, even now?

 _Make it stop_.

He has no idea who he’s taunting, who he’s begging for mercy or release.

_Alone. Alone. Alone._

He has no idea.

_Please make it stop._

Not anymore.

_________________________________________

The pleasant buzz that’s propelled John across the past hours—mad hours, brilliant hours, more than he could have imagined, more than he could have hoped, more than he thinks he can stand for much longer, if he’s honest, as he reaches for the last champagne flute from a passing tray; the buzz is starting to wane, and it’s more a warmth, now. Just a subtle warmth.

It’s meant to be more, though. It’s missing something.

“Where’s our best man?”

“Best and wisest, wasn’t it?” Mary nudges him, and it’s funny, and strange, and it makes it a bit giddy, to think of all that’s changed, of all that’s returned, of all the words he’d whispered to her in the night, between shameful tears and a heartbreak he didn’t feel he’d earned, not rightly: it doesn’t sting anymore.

There’s not a loss, there. There’s not a gaping hole.

“One of the two in attendance,” Mary grins, loops her arm in his as she looks around. “I haven’t seen him,” she frowns a bit. “He wanted to dance, maybe—”

“No, he’s not out there,” John shakes his head. “Already looked.”

“Hmm,” Mary bites her lower lip, and her nose does that lovely little scrunch that he so adores as she casts a sideways glance at John. “Him and Janine?”

“No, god,” John balks, because, because; “Well, I mean,” he falters, and what does he mean, really? Does he mean that he can’t imagine Sherlock with anyone? Can’t reconcile a Sherlock who pulls a bridesmaid with the Sherlock he knows, the Sherlock he loves—

Or does he mean that he can’t, _won’t_ think of Sherlock off with someone else? At the wedding— _this_ wedding—of all times.

John swallows, and he feels the flush that rises up his neck, the tightness that gathers against the knot of his tie, and it’s nothing to do with the drink, of that he’s certain.

“I don’t think so,” he says, slow and soft: “No.”

Mary watches him closely, reads all the unsaid words, and John’s lucky, really, that Sherlock came first, else he’d never have known how to live with a gaze that saw as much through intuition, sometimes, as others gleaned from observation. 

“Right,” Mary heaves a sigh, something bright and worrisome shining in her gaze as she leads the way, smiling through the still-packed hall. “When’s the last we saw him?”

“After the,” John glances at Mary’s midsection, and it makes him feel strange, because he wants to smile, perhaps he wants to cry, but there’s something sick brewing in the pit of his stomach that makes it all feel secondary: very far away.

“About an hour ago,” Mary says breathily, and when she catches John’s gaze, he sees his own apprehension laid bare in her eyes.

They make it to round the perimeter of the room before they find anything of consequence.

“John,” and the tone of Mary’s voice sends his blood running cold in the veins as he turns, looks. 

“He left his violin,” she says, lifting the bow, studying it like a precious thing.

“And,” her eyes dart to the stand he’d read from, played from, spoke words that made John’s heart pump desperate, a promise that made all the promises he wanted to give—all the promises they _both_ wanted to give in return seem possible; seem welcome, perhaps—a family as strange and unconventional and brillant as they deserved, the three of them.

The four of them.

John blinks away the half-formed visions, the silly ramblings of the past six months: pillow talk of Sherlock’s place in the second bedroom; of children whose night feedings Sherlock could head up, given his sleep schedule; of nights on a sofa with three spots and all three of them filled; of what that hair felt like, _really_ , though they’ll never speak of that conversation aloud; of a larger bed maybe, just _maybe_ , one day; of adventure and delight and no more denying what joy could really be.

No more loss.

John blinks it away, those amorphous fantasies, to see the envelope in Mary’s hand, marked in Sherlock’s crisp hand.

“And this,” Mary breathes, eyes wide, and there’s something impersonal, something foreboding in the way it’s addressed: _Dr. and Mrs Watson_.

Mary holds it out to him, but he can’t make his hand reach for it, can’t force himself to take this thing that feels, that seems, that’s just—

Wrong.

He watches, and his breath comes short as she unfolds what’s inside.

“God,” she gasps, covers her mouth. “Did you know he’d written it for _us_?”

She extends a hand, implores John to look at the dedication above the staves: his lungs constrict, and it’s fucking painful, because yes, John knew Sherlock would play, and he knew that Sherlock had been composing, or at least putting his own spin on a piece for the past weeks, maybe longer—maybe longer, and he should have known, he should have _known_.

A waltz, for two.

In _triple_ fucking _time_.

John can’t breathe. 

“John,” Mary pulls him back to the present, and her face is pale when he meets her eyes. “This feels,” and she chokes, and the whites of her eyes are bristling with fear for the things that begin to take shape in the empty spaces Sherlock should be in, should breathe in.

With _them_.

“Yeah,” John breathes, heavy. “Yeah, it,” he runs a hand through his hair, across his face, and forces himself to steady, be steady: neither tremblings hands nor a trembling heart will be of any help, no matter what comes of this. 

“Yeah,” John exhales, careful, and if the shaking subsides in him, it doesn’t fully flee. “Bit not good.”

His eyes flicker across the hall, once more: one last time, because maybe, just maybe, he’s missed something, missed the vital presence of one man, this man, this incredible intellect and unthinkable heart that is needed, is wanted.

By god: that is _loved_.

His eyes flicker, and he sees the bow, and then the face: Molly.

She meets his eyes, and his heart sinks, leaden: it takes no more than the look between them to know the dire truth.

“Mary,” John breathes heavy, hard. “Mary, we have to go.” He takes her hand and looks her straight in the eye, and she gasps at the naked terror he knows she sees, knows she wanted not to see, so that she could tame her own, and he wishes he could give her better, give her softer and kinder: but this is them.

This is them, and there is a whole half of what they are, what they’ve become, at stake.

That is terrifying, and John won’t degrade it by making it anything less.

“We have to go _now_.”

She doesn’t look back.

_________________________________________

 

If there’s a part of himself that Sherlock hates, that he despises in this moment, it’s his lungs: his inadequate lungs that are stretching and burning and failing to give him anything worthwhile in their rampant twitching as his chest heaves, as he tries very hard to give breathing a worthwhile go despite the pressure, despite the way every thing halts and shivers and gives because he is safe, he is safe, he is _safe_ and yet they plague him, motion in the dark: he is safe. He is alone. Alone protects.

Incorrect.

Idiot lungs.

He inhales deliberately, like he knows he should, knows he must: like he’s learned over these months, these years: fight it. Fight the way he seizes with guilt, with terror beyond his own comprehension, his own logical understanding of experience, of cause and effect—and then there’s his muscles: uncoordinated failures of physiology, twitching as he drops a smouldering butt to the floor. The flinching is minimal, but ever-present, and the same part of him that ache at the empty flat are the ones that rejoice in it, that feel relief at not being seen, not being found.

The tremor though: the tremor is telling, is the clue that shouts loudest and begs most desperately to be ignored on the long nights, in the cold. The tremor he knows, and knows how to hide it, knows how to translate his own shameful lack of control into vitality, vivaciousness, ridiculous animation, for he is a ridiculous man and his eccentricities will be seen and dismissed, so he clenches his fingers and shakes out his wrist and spreads his arms wide, demonstratively, and wills it to make an oblique sort of sense even as he wishes, most desperately, to tear his nerve endings apart, to peel away the ligaments and rip at the muscles, useless fibres—what good are they, what use if they can’t be reliable, if they won’t obey his commands, the intentions and desires of his brain?

Idiot muscles.

Though speaking of the brain: it’s a bit of a useless mess at present, in itself. Lazy, clouded, sluggish: he can barely see the Palace through a haze so thick, flickering, navigates by touch along except he trembles, he trembles. He can pick out faces—a moustache, a blade, a monk’s hood, a waistcoat, a French twist, red lips and agony, and joy that hurts worse than the agony, but his brain’s not able to parse what that means, why that is, whether it’s a contradiction or there’s logic in there, somewhere; it can’t know because it is too busy cannibalising itself, running potential scenarios that have no come to pass, that did not come to pass but could, but might—cannot be forgotten because they lulled him into unconsciousness after days of hateful fear. And the echoes, the echoes are as tangible as the initial sounds themselves: a trigger-happy finger, ready to discharge and destroy, and he cannot sleep, he cannot breathe, he cannot think past folded napkins and the mastering of his own fingertips, he is overcome, he is useless, he is unwanted and for good reason, for all reasons—

Idiot brain. 

Except perhaps it’s not just that.

Perhaps it’s also his idiot heart: wretched thing that caused this mess, though it didn’t, that’s a fallacy, idiot brain, idiot sentiment—but it’s his heart that hurts, his chest that’s tight with wanting, and the muscle itself that’s thrumming wildly to the point of pain beneath his ribs, spelling out words, names, two names, over and over without effect or relent: insane, repetition without quantitative yield.

Save that the beating intensifies. 

And he is _alone_. He is alone, and if it protects than it also consumes, it also claws to the bleeding, it also makes him hollow and cold and he only wants to forget. It’s getting hazy, and everything feel stretched, feels sore: something else to focus on, to gravitate toward.

He is alone, he will always be alone.

_Alone protects him._

He doesn’t believe that, he never believed that.

He doesn’t believe that, anymore.

And his _chest_ , dear _god_.He breathes, tries to breathe, and his eyes fix on it: glassy, unfocused, streaming salt to his lips—idiot, _idiot_ eyes.

It is a last resort. It has been a last resort. A guaranteed solution for the agony in him, deeper even than the scalding riot of his cardiopulmonary system in revolt. 

The glass of it is clear, pristine: unfeeling.

The needle is sharp, precise: a vow unbroken; a promise always kept.

He’d resisted. He’d resisted as he scoured the world and murdered and ached.

He watches it, watching him—feels the phantom sink of the hypodermic through his flesh as it rises in his memory, bubbles to the surface. He’d resisted. Through everything, through the hurt that’s malformed him, now, that’s taken him and twisted him into a caricature of what he was, what he should be—and who _is_ Sherlock Holmes, what does that _mean_ —but he’d told himself that he could break when it was done, when he returned, because he’d have tea and the scent of home and arms, if not around him, then near, and he’d be alright.

He’d be _alright_ , because he wouldn’t be alone.

His breath stutters; the shape of the syringe on the table before him is warped with the glaze of his eyes—catches light, too sheer: it hurts.

His hands shake, more than a tremor; idiot muscles.

His heart twists.

Idiot heart.

_________________________________________  
The driver’s doing an admirable job pushing the car’s limits for speed, but it still feels too damned slow.

Too damned _late_.

“We’ve spent the past fifteen weeks in his pocket,” John says, and if his fingers drum any harder, any more desperate on the rim of the window, he might very well crack the damned thing. “We barely let him out of our fucking sights, you kiss him goodbye when we do—”

“On the cheek,” Mary says softly, dialing Sherlock’s number on her mobile for the tenth, the twentieth, the fiftieth time. “What if he doesn’t know me well enough to understand?”

Which is not what John wants to think about; doesn’t want to think about a Sherlock who doesn’t know that Mary kissing him, touching him, being so near is not a simple thing, is not a given: she is affectionate on the whole, but the way she is with him is _more_ , and Sherlock sees _everything_ —

“There are days where we both see more of him than we do of each other,” John shakes his head, growing ever more frantic. “How could he not understand—”

“Obviously, it wasn’t enough,” Mary cuts him off, expression grim.

John forces himself to breathe.

“We don’t know,” he reasons aloud, as if that will make it more solid, more true. “We don’t know, maybe there was a case—”

“He interrupted dinner for a murder,” Mary points out, tone clipped, teetering on the edge of something dreadful. “Think he’d have kept a case to himself?”

“Maybe Mycroft,” John starts, but his throat grows tight before it goes anywhere, because he’d tried Mycroft’s phone, text and voice: nothing.

Mary sighs, and it’s shaky, as she sets her mobile on her lap. “He’s not answering,” she whispers before she looks at John, eyes wide and damp before they close, before her inhale shivers and she grasps blindly for John’s hand.

“John, he promised,” she says, and her palm in his is clammy—or maybe it’s his, or maybe it’s both. “He,” and something hateful rises in her throat and sounds broken when it cuts her off. John squeezes her hand in his own, guides her to his chest and holds her, more to brace them both than to offer any comfort: she is the rock, here. She is always the rock.

“Always,” Mary murmurs into John’s neck, fierce. “That’s what he said, and we…”

He thinks, for a moment, that she’s shaking; thinks that it’s only her own tears that wet his skin.

They’re both crying, it turns out; but he’s the one who’s shaking.

“He wanted to dance,” Mary says, and it’s so tortured, and this isn’t how it was supposed to go, this isn’t _right_. “He wanted to dance and we walked away.” She looks up at John, and he never wants to see anyone he loves look that horrified, that heartbroken.

He flinches when, in his mind, he looks closer at the image of Sherlock in his mind, those last moments, peels back the layers and looks beyond the obvious and _sees_ : it’s worse.

Oh _god_.

“What were we _thinking_ , John?” Mary asks, hoarse, and John doesn’t know.

John doesn’t know how he missed that sorrow, those fractures: John doesn’t know how he’s _been_ missing them, now that he thinks of it, now that he runs through what he can recall and looks, _looks_.

Fuck. _Fuck_.

“Limits,” Mary scoffs hatefully. “Since when have there been limits when he’s involved?” She sits up, settles against the seat behind them and stares, gapes ahead of her, disbelieveing: “What were we…”

“I don’t know, darling,” John exhales, dumbfounded: so goddamned scared. “I don’t fucking know.”

“We did this, didn’t we?” Mary whispers. “Whatever we,” she swallows visibly, and when John looks at her, studies the rigid profile of her body, he can count the frantic pace of her pulse in her neck. “Whatever we find, we did this.”

And John’s pulse is racing, too: adrenaline hot in his blood, because he’ll be damned if he loses that mad bastard to whatever idiocy he’s run off to drown in. He’ll be damned if he asks his heart to take that fall again.

He’ll be damned if he misses the signs and misreads the clues any longer. He’ll be damned if his own stupidity, his own inability to be Sherlock fucking Holmes and _observe_ one of only two people who fucking _matter_ , to see the signs in fluorescents, to read the bold print that everything about Sherlock, all the changes and the shifts, have been screaming, fucking _screaming_ —

“Oh dear god,” John breathes out, near inaudible, because Christ, _Christ_ —Sherlock’s got a fucking intermittent _tremor_.

“Tell me we can fix it,” Mary begs, demands, eyes red but hard. “Tell me there’s still time.”

John can barely breathe, let alone speak any comfort to her.

“He just wanted to dance,” Mary shivers, and her tears catch in the streetlights, glimmer on the skin of her cheeks. 

“He wanted _us_ , John,” she marvels, devastated. “ _Him_ ,” she catches John’s eyes, and god, oh god, they’ve been blind.

“Of all people, he picked us,” Mary breathes, and it sears John’s soul through the way they stare at once another, unblinking: “And we told him—” Mary chokes on a sob, gasps through it, and it hits John hard, straight in the chest.

Oh, god, _no_

“He said always,” Mary whispers to no one, to nothing, to the universe. “He promised always.”

And if John’s heart had soared at that, if John had felt the worlds align and make a kind of sense he’d never thought to look for when Sherlock said those words: if John had been proven wrong about what love felt like in its wholeness, in its perfection, in those moment, then he’s crumbling, plummeting, shivering now; he’s breaking, and it’s horrific, and it can’t be like this, it can’t end like this: he can’t have gotten Sherlock back just to lose him.

He can’t have held Sherlock’s heart after so much _wanting_ , only to let it slip away because he dared to blink.

“I want always, John,” Mary says, voice flat and eyes blank but resolute: it’s a statement, not a request. “I want always twice over.”

“So do I, love,” John answers, shaky, and he reaches for Mary’s hand, lets the way her grasp enfolds him ground the only part of him that can be steadied. “God,” he gasps; “I...” 

He stares out the window, and prays, because it’s gotten him what he needs and doesn’t deserve before, and maybe it’ll work again, with his eyes on the lights of the city, with his heart in his throat: _maybe_.

He prays, and holds Mary all the closer.

“So do I.”


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thanks to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) and [ScienceofObsession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession) for looking this over, encouraging my babble, and all the rest. And to [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), for the usual reasons.

John has the keys to 221 in the lock within moments of climbing from the still-moving car; he opens the door, and Mary’s around him, half-up the steps before he can breathe.

“Sherlock?” she calls, voice pitchy, the cords of it strung tight as she tries the door to the flat—unlocked—and pushes in, John on her heels.

“Sherlock?” she asks again, her head turning left as John’s turns right, and the gasp that comes from her mouth sets John’s heart into a freefall.

“Oh, Christ, John!” Mary’s already on her knees next to a pile of half-smoked cigarettes, her hands framing Sherlock’s face, his close-lidded eyes. 

“Sherlock, come on, look at me,” she coaxes, moves to grasp his shoulders and shake at him, just a tad, before John’s there, moving her brusquely, frantic, and she settles a hand against Sherlock’s chest—his moving chest: rising and falling but slow, very slow—as John leans in, tries to calm his mind, his pulse.

“Goddamnit, Sherlock,” John breathes as he reaches for Sherlock’s carotid, counts the beats with one hand as he peels the patches, blindly, from Sherlock’s right arm with the other; as Mary tends to the left, ripping the things viciously from Sherlock and throwing them across the room, irrationally protective of his skin, his self. 

“You can’t do this, don’t do this to me, love,” John whispers, and Sherlock’s blood is pumping hard against his fingertips like it wasn’t, like it hadn’t before— _before_ —and yet the evidence of John’s senses does little, does nothing to stay the swell of agony that overtakes him, even now, at the thought, the mere idea of losing, and he breathes, begs: “Don’t do this _again_.”

John somehow—instincts, he suspects, something trained into him married to a thing bred deep—strikes a balance between the grief in him and the mind, the facts: he presses his lips to Sherlock’s brow, just as his mum used to, to check for fever: lingers there, eyes closed, and breathes.

Breathes.

Mary’s nearly shaking next to him by the time he surfaces from the feel of Sherlock’s skin, the slight over-warmth, the dampness of sweat at his curls.

“His vitals are,” John rasps out, and the hand at Sherlock’s neck moves to stroke his jaw as John watches Sherlock’s face: placid, almost, but too pinched—eyes moving frantically beneath the lids. “He’s—” and John chokes because this, _this_ : this was always here, this had been here so long, this was in front of him and inside of him and how could he be so stupid? How could anyone be so goddamned _blind_ —

“He’s alright,” John exhales, soft, almost afraid to say it, lest he break something, lest he step wrong once more, one too many times.

“His heart’s racing,” Mary protests, hand still splayed on Sherlock chest, and the worry in her voice is visceral, so heavy that it weighs John down in kind, makes him second-guess.

“It’s steady, though,” and John counts again, to be sure: elevated, absolutely, but regular for it, constant. The tightness in John’s own chest migrates to his throat.

“If there’s as much nicotine in his system as I think there is,” he tells her, “It’d be far worse than this, had he been using.”

The empty syringe—untouched, unused, but _there_ on the table next to him, nonetheless: it makes John’s heart clench; makes his stomach churn.

Too goddamn _close_.

John feels Sherlock swallow through the beat of his pulse where John’s hand still settles against his throat; there’s a flinch to his features, subtle, but John aches with it, leans toward it, only moves back when Mary crowds him, cups Sherlock’s cheek with the hand not held against his heart.

“Sherlock,” she murmurs, strained. “Darling, come on,” she traces his jaw softly, back and forth, with the pad of her thumb as she coaxes, breathes: “Eyes open, come on.”

Sherlock’s face twitches, and John feels his heart leap with it, painful.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

They both stare at Sherlock, wait for his eyes to open, but they’re still flickering blind, back and forth: still closed.

“Sherlock?” John asks, voice hoarse, and he doesn’t process reaching for Sherlock’s hand until Sherlock’s fingers close around his own.

“I moved you,” and a frown, or the threat of one, tugs on Sherlock’s lips. “Deleted,” he breathes in, harsh: “That.”

“That?” Mary asks, soft, and Sherlock moves his free hand to cover hers upon him, press her touch deeper toward his skin.

“The mind palace,” John whispers, letting the little tells slip into place: Sherlock is elsewhere. Sherlock is deleting, moving, rearranging, reprioritising. Sherlock doesn’t know they’re _here_.

“Burn,” Sherlock hisses, and it’s hazy, slurred: muttered; half-aware, and yet it catches in John’s chest, in Mary’s by the way that she flinches: half-aware, but wholly honest. “Burn,” Sherlock repeats, and the way his voice breaks, seethes loss and heartache makes John feel just a little bit lightheaded: “Burning.”

Mary catches his eye, and John feels ill, impossibly ill at the core of him, with the way her eyes threaten to spill over, the way her fingers spread to keep Sherlock’s between them on that man’s chest: rising-falling.

Breathing.

 _Living_.

John’s own breath is a trial as he draws it, as he takes what he hasn’t earned, steals beyond his deserving for the way he’s missed the signals, the way he’s overlooked this perfect necessity, this cavernous fracture in the heart of him.

The heart of all three of them.

“Deleted it,” Sherlock whispers, twists slightly, moans: “Tried,” he gasps, and it shakes Mary’s hand on his torso; digs hard, breaks skin at the nails as he grasps, clutches like the ending of the world, like the falling to the death: “Still burning.”

And John can feel it. He can feel the sting.

“Pierced,” Sherlock tells them, and the purse of his lips trembles around the words as his eyes screw harder, close all the more to the world beyond: “puncture wound.”

“Bound tight,” and John’s hand is raised, clasped hard to Sherlock’s chest alongside Mary’s, and that heart is pounding, racing, and it terrifies John to think through the what ifs, to dwell on the maybes and _god, no’s_. 

“You bound it tight,” Sherlock whispers, and John can feel the twitch of every beat, the shiver of it, trembling, and he can tell that Mary feels it too, that Mary feels it deeper than the touch just like he does: he can tell in every drop that falls from her eyes, too bright, as she watches Sherlock’s fingers convulse around hers, around his, holding them close to a wound they can’t see but are beginning to understand—quite wretchedly, quite desperately, and it feels like bleeding on the sand, on the pavement—they’re beginning to understand that the wound in Sherlock’s mind, in Sherlock’s chest; they’re beginning to see it runs deep.

So deep.

“Here.” Sherlock breathes it, holds their hands steady, and if not for the pressure of his grip, John sure he’d be shaking for the depth of feeling, the depth of remorse, of guilt: the bounding, fathomless fury of that heartbeat, damning and true.

“Gone,” Sherlock mouths, jaw slack as his grip gives way, as his arms fall limp, and Mary starts as John’s hand presses close to the chest again of his own accord, to be sure there’s still a rhythm keeping frantic time inside.

“Delayed,” Sherlock speaks it shrilly, the click of the consonants like a dagger, a blade: “Action,” and John’s breath is sharp, a garrotte to the throat: “stabbing.”

The sound that escapes from Mary’s throat at that sounds like dying, like _dying_ ; John feel his stomach wretch; he is going to be ill, he is going to—

“Bleeding,” Sherlock murmurs, disjointed, half-caught in the ether; “ _burning._ ”

“Sherlock,” Mary starts, pleading, moving to take his hand in hers once more.

“Ash,” Sherlock responds, but doesn’t respond, locked in his mind, hidden from view: never more open, more vulnerable, more bare.

“I know ash,” Sherlock breathes, and John wants to sob, John wants to draw Sherlock to him, John wants to kiss the sorrow from that mouth, wants to wring it from that heart and make it not _hurt_ like this, for any one of them: never again.

“I know ash,” Sherlock repeats, and it’s faint, it’s small, and it’s not _him_ , except it is, it _is_ , and how could John have missed this, how could John have turned and never _seen_ : “Not _this_ ash.”

Dear _god_ , but he sounds so _lost_.

“It’s horrific,” Sherlock laments, and his face is twisted with that horror, that sheer torment, his eyes clenched closed all the tighter against it, save that it’s inside: save that he can’t seem to run. “It’s vile, it—”

His voice breaks, and John watches the way that his throat moves around too many swallows, too thick. 

“Love,” he forces out, and the sound of his voice drags like hot coals, shattered glass. “Love is vicious,” he whispers, shuddering: “Isn’t it?”

John has the sudden desire to tear his own heart out, immediate and fierce, when Sherlock’s hand come to rest on his chest, lonely, splayed against the centre as it heaves.

“Can’t beat a waltz,” Sherlock gasps, a breathy laugh that bleeds despair. “Only room for two,” his breath hitches, “Three,” and again; “Two.”

“Four,” Mary whispers, gathering Sherlock’s hand and bringing it to her chest instead, holding it there with a death grip, such need. “Four, love,” she tells him, and breathes; “between us both.”

“Mmm,” Sherlock hums, and if his voice is thin, thready, it’s nothing to the way his lips quirk with a kind of devastation John didn’t think it was possible to see, not in reality, not with his own eyes.

“It would,” and if his voice, his desolate smile were like knives to the heart, the single tear that escapes his closed eyes is the killing blow: “It’d be nice.”

He shakes his head, and Mary’s shoulders shake with sobs that threaten to break.

“Burning,” he tells her, like a secret. “ _Wanting_ ,” he gasps, wet and harsh: “Different ash.”

The pressure in John’s chest builds until he’s certain, he is damned certain his ribs could break with it, could crack and fucking shatter.

“Close,” Sherlock whispers, and he reaches: John doesn’t know if he’s the one Sherlock’s reaching for, but he can’t stop himself from reaching back, from allowing himself to be eased to Sherlock’s chest, torso to torso, pressed side against side to Mary where she still clutches Sherlock’s hand. 

“Close,” and John hears the words through Sherlock’s chest now, all the more strained; all the more devastating. “Stop the bleeding,” he murmurs, and it sounds clogged, it flounders; “It’s been bleeding for so long,” he moans, and John shakes with the force of the sob that lodges between his two lungs. 

“M’tired,” Sherlock sighs, so empty, too empty. “So,” he stammers; “so...”

He trails, and John feels saltwater trail from his eyes to Sherlock’s shirt: his waistcoat, from the wedding, rough against his cheek. 

Until Sherlock seizes, tenses: the whole of him going so still it makes John’s pulse catch before Sherlock starts shaking, uncontrollable. 

“They’re coming,” and John can damn well hear the surge of adrenaline when it spikes through Sherlock’s heart beneath him; when the lungs below start to wheeze for all that compresses them.

“They’re always coming,” Sherlock bites through clenched teeth, and John straightens as Mary’s hand begins to stroke, to ease across Sherlock’s chest, soothing as best she can.

“Sherlock,” she urges him gently, but the panic in her tone is like ice, like a fever chill; “ _Breathe_.”

“Can’t,” Sherlock gasps, bats at their hands as they both reach for him, ache for him; bats at their hands as he moves to cling all at once, uncoordinated, lungs panting wild: “Can’t, they’re coming.” 

“Sherlock,” John pleads, and he takes Sherlock’s pulse because he needs to, because he’s terrified and he hopes it will counter the fear in him to know something solid, something sure: “calm down.”

Sherlock pulse is percussive, bounding: it does nothing but feed John’s dread.

“ _Can’t_!” Sherlock croaks, shaking. “Can’t calm down, I’ll fail, they’ll find me—”

He shakes, twists, trembles, speaks nonsense: “Scars,” he pants; “scars don’t count, scars won’t save.”

“Alone, alone protects, no,” he trembles, and John’s scrambling, because he’s not one to speak of feeling, he’s not one to say, but action, doing: that he knows, and he crawls over Sherlock’s body, settles around Sherlock’s knees and braces against Sherlock’s arms just as Mary curses, as she stands and slides, careful, quiet as she can behind Sherlock and eases his trembling frame upward, just enough to slip behind and grasp him, hold him, clutch him close against her chest.

“No, friends, friends protect,” Sherlock whispers, haunted, and he’s pale, so very pale, and John looks at Mary, while Mary looks at him, and they realise, all at once, that maybe they’ll still lose this piece of them, this part of their own thrashing hearts: maybe they’ll lose him to something deeper, something more wretched than the organs and the muscles of him going slack.

Maybe they already have.

“Love,” Sherlock rasps, like a battle cry, like a death rattle, and it cuts through John with a fire he cannot endure.

“Sherlock,” John breathes, half sobbed, wholly broken, but the man doesn’t hear him: can’t.

“Love, that,” Sherlock continues, marvels, reaches toward nothing as John fits his hand to Sherlock’s empty one, expectant, because there’s nothing else, there’s _nothing else_.

“Love,” Sherlock exhales, bereft, “Couldn’t,” and he fights John’s grasp, John’s hand in his hand to reach, to stretch toward the table next to them, to grope for the needle that’s staring at them: villainous. 

“Couldn’t,” Sherlock shakes, and Mary strokes his hair as John takes his hand once more and fights for it, fights for him, kisses the centre of Sherlock’s palm because what else is there, what else can he do?

“Wanted to,” Sherlock moans, miserable; “ _Needed_ ,” and his palm rubs viciously up and down his forearm, hypnotic: “A solution, _my_ solution,” he gasps, and it’s viscous, rasping in his lungs.

“Couldn’t,” he whispers. “Couldn’t risk failing.”

He quiets, he stills, and the heart of him against where John leans clamours like a wraith as he clasps John’s hand tight: “Couldn’t risk you.”

John bites at his lip to keep the tortured keen in his throat from escaping; no matter how he screws his eyes shut, though, he can’t stop the tears that spill. 

“Couldn’t, couldn’t, can’t,” Sherlock stammers; “Even,” he gulps, “even now.”

“Lost you,” Sherlock reaches, traces Mary’s profile and feels his way close to run a hand across her cheek, tender: tangles in the loose strands of her hair. 

“Lost you both,” he mourns, chokes on the weight of it: “Hope—” and his voice snaps, abandons him as he shakes through a sob.

“Hope is,” Sherlock struggles for breath: “A plague,” he hisses, “it _burns_.”

“But I couldn’t,” Sherlock breathes, barely; “Just in case,” and John’s head is bowed to Sherlock’s chest, bowed close as he shakes with the force of what he’s seeing, what he’s hearing, what he could have maybe eased, maybe stopped, had he _seen_ , and Sherlock’s hand in John’s hair is a benediction and a lance, unbearable as he leans into it, takes a comfort he’s done nothing to earn. 

“Just in case there was something I could keep,” Sherlock speaks it, soft, and Mary whimpers into Sherlock’s curls, presses her lips to his hair: “Still keep.”

“All of it,” Mary whispers to him, nearly moans against the skin of his scalp, and John resonates entirely with the anguish in her voice as she promises, as she vows: “All of us, Sherlock. You can keep the whole of us.”

John nods into Sherlock’s front, draws a shuddering breath before he fits his mouth against the pulsing beat of Sherlock’s heart in an attempt to signal something primal, something ageless that he repents, that he atones, that if he’s given the chance he’ll never let this happen.

If he’s given the chance, he will never let this happen again.

“Ash,” Sherlock murmurs, and his body tenses against whatever’s to come: “This ash hurts,” he moans, reaches to press John’s head closer to his chest as the words rush out: “ _Precious_.”

John crumbles when Sherlock’s hand starts carding through his hair once more.

“Precious ash,” Sherlock sighs, nearly croons. “Precious ash needs so much saving,” he says softly: melodic, like a dirge.

“Just because it’s ash now,” Sherlock whispers, and John can feel how he arches, leans into Mary’s warmth at his back, can feel the handful of steady breaths lift Sherlock’s chest, and John’s head in kind.

“Just because it’s ash doesn’t mean it isn’t loved.”

John feels his eyes drift closed, feels the sorrow in him spill beneath the lids and he keeps a hand to Sherlock’s chest as he reaches for Mary’s hand, clutches it desperately and draws strength from the force of her grip, because god, dear _god_ , how did it come to this?

“Vicious,” Sherlock mumbles, and he sounds conflicted, confused, and there is a moment, one moment, in which John fears the unknown, the inevitable.

And then it comes back: the tension, the pounding of Sherlock’s heart inside that quivering chest.

“I moved you,” Sherlock says slowly, and John can feel Sherlock’s muscles clench, preparing for something unseen, unnamed: ominous.

“I moved you,” Sherlock repeats, the tone of him frantic, flailing. “Why won’t you,” Sherlock swallows, and John has to raise his head, has to sit up because Sherlock’s heartbeat, Sherlock’s shallow breaths are painful enough to see, to hear, let alone _feel_.

“Why can’t I,” Sherlock gasps, and oh, it’s wrapped up in a sob as Sherlock exhales a tremulous moan that makes him seem so shattered, so young.

“Hurts,” Sherlock whispers, and what’s left of John, unbroken, is rent at the seams. 

“Shh,” John tries because he cannot bear this, he _can’t_. “I’m sorry,” John whispers, and the tears flow against his will, without his consent, with recourse, now: they flow and they fall. “Sherlock, I’m _sorry_ —”

“No, no,” Sherlock snaps, and the terror in him is goddamned palpable. “You have to move. You have to be safe,” his breath is quick, inefficient: panting without any real effect. “You have to leave,” he insists. “Go,” he breathes, before near-screaming, choked against the tortured sound as it comes: “ _Go_!”

“Sherlock, please,” Mary pleads with him, the heart of her breaking audibly in her voice: “We’re safe right here, we’re all safe.”

“You’re safe, Sherlock,” John echoes, murmurs close to Sherlock’s skin. “You are so safe,” he promises; “so, so safe, love.”

“No, no,” Sherlock shivers, and he’s gasping, he’s breaking: he’s caught in the nightmare of his own mind, and John knows what that’s like, except his mind is nothing, _nothing_ compared to Sherlock’s, and this is horrifying, this hurts straight down to the soul.

“You have to move,” Sherlock begs them, berates: “Why won’t you _move_ —”

“We’re safe here,” John tells him with all the truth he knows, all the truth he can stand. “We _want_ to be _here_.” 

“No,” Sherlock repeats it, a chilling mantra, a horrible repetition. “No.”

“What’s wrong with here, Sherlock?” Mary asks him, aching. “What’s not safe?”

“Me,” Sherlock tears out from his throat, and John feels raw with it, horrified: “ _Me_ ,” he shakes: “I’m not, the heart isn’t, it can’t,” he sucks in air, and it sounds like he’s drowning: “I can’t, I don’t _know_ —”

“Sherlock, _please_ ,” John moans against him, desperate, but Sherlock doesn’t hear it, Sherlock’s too far gone.

“Malfunction,” Sherlock rasps. “It’s defective, defecti—” he stumbles on a gasp. “Fail,” he shakes out; “fail, fail, fail,” he stammers, a broken record. “I’ll ruin you, I’ll burn you, it’s not safe, you have to leave.” He sits up, his eyes fluttering rapidly, and John wonders what would happen if he could just open them, if he could break the spell and _see_.

“Keep you safe,” Sherlock pants; “It’s all for nothing if you’re not safe.”

“What about you?” John demands, runs his hands up and down Sherlock’s arms while Mary holds him tight against her, holds him close and breathes against his neck. “What about keeping _you_ safe?”

“Not,” Sherlock stutters, voice thick with poisonous feeling. “Not relevant,” he forces out: “not the heart, not burning,” he breathes in sharp, harsh, through a stab of unknown pain: “Keep you safe—”

And something flags, then, starts to drain, and John doesn’t know whether to feel relieved or afraid as Sherlock lets out a long breath, uncannily steady as he whispers:

“So safe.” As he whispers:

“Precious ash. You have to go. I’ll keep the ash.”

As he whispers, deadened:

“ _Burning_.”

Then he gasps, and his eyes snap open, unseeing for an instant before they drift closed again, and the man they hold between them goes boneless, goes limp.

John’s heart freezes as he reaches to take Sherlock’s pulse, and there is a moment between the fearing and the knowing where John near-wishes for death, but then Sherlock breathes again, and the fight drains from John against a singular beat as he measures the life of Sherlock Holmes with his hands, as he feels the war in this man he loves start to flee, the battle to ebb, and it’s sleep, thank god: he’s asleep.

“Will he be alright?” Mary breathes, doesn’t yet dare to move.

John collapses against Sherlock’s chest, sprawled desperate against the depth of his breaths, now, the calming of his heart. 

“I don’t,” John whispers; “I don’t know.”

He hates that he doesn’t know.

“Never again,” Mary says, soft but resolute, and John doesn’t have to look up, doesn’t need to meet her eyes to know what she means, to concur wholeheartedly.

“We’re not letting go of him,” Mary pledges with a singular passion that John loves in her, needs in her: “Not ever again.”

John closes his eyes and reminds himself that Sherlock is breathing, that Sherlock is warm, and that Sherlock is here, with them both: kept safe between their bodies, at least for now.

John doesn’t know that it’s enough, but it is _something_.

He exhales slow, and composes a prayer to the universe, to every deity that is and was, and whichever of the gods it is who’s been answering his desperate pleas: that’s the one he vows it to the strongest.

_I love him. We need him. Please._

_Please_.


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) for the beta and the encouragement: you are a marvel, doll.
> 
> And thanks to every one of you, who didn't mind this little pre-E3 indulgence, and came along for the ride <3

Sherlock wakes to warmth.

Sherlock wakes to warmth, and it is exquisite. 

There’s warmth above him, around him, stretched across him: there’s heat, solid and steady, whispered out against his neck in careful puffs. There is comfort, twined around his torso, clutching to him as if he is essential; as if he counts.

There is also warmth below him, rising and falling: tidal. The warmth below him is soft, inviting, and he nestles into it, unthinking: relishes the way his face dips against the plush valleys of flesh, the way the upward curve of his lips press against the subtle hum of a heartbeat so close.

Sherlock wakes to warmth.

He blinks, inhales sharp.

God _damnit_ , he curses himself, his mind—he’d given in to weakness, to sentiment, to the depths of feelings roiling within him; he’d given in to the pathetic indulgence of his deepest desires in a moment of disgusting vulnerability. He’d invaded his hidden stash; had even dug out the instruments of his darker days, just to look at them, for _comfort_ , Christ—were there darker days? Was the cocaine worse than this, this passionate dissolution, this horrific breaking from within, where he not only gives in, and trembles with the loss of all he holds close to the fledgling heart of him; not only shakes with the overwhelming sensation of abandonment, rejection— _bereft_ —but _imagines_ the light inside that heart in the flesh, rips them from the happiness of their realities and uses them within his own mind for his own purposes, to hold him and offer him solace, to whisper constancy and demonstrate affection, at least, if not love.

Not love. Never love.

And now he’s woken, shaken off the vestiges of his shameful night of indulgence, of wracking emotion: now he’s awake, and yet his wants, his _needs_ are determined to persist.

Are determined to _taunt_ , and wring at the very soul of him: wrapped around him, breathing, warm—as if they care deeply. As if they could—

He is a wretched thing, and now he cannot even trust his own _mind_ not to betray him.

“Mmm.”

The displeased moan comes from atop his chest, the hand on his sternum clutching at his shirt as John frowns against wakefulness, and Sherlock closes his eyes, relishes—pitiful, utterly despicable—the image of John atop him, comfortable, nestling closer to avoid morning: Sherlock closes his eyes and reins his mind, censures himself: _You are greater than the things you cannot change._

 _You’ve always constructed yourself out of loss_.

 _You made a vow_.

He breathes in deep, bids a silent farewell to the figures in his heart, in his mind, and moves to rise.

Which gets him a tight arm around the clavicle, and a jumble of limbs sprawling off his midsection and onto the floor.

“Fucking,” John curses as he lands, hands flailing to catch himself far too late.

“Mmm,” the arm holding Sherlock—attached to a human, a female, _Mary_ —mumbles beneath him. “Mmm, sleep.”

Sherlock’s pulse leaps and he struggles against the hold. 

“No,” Mary whines, eyes screwed closed as she shifts underneath him. “Wedding. Sherlock,” she sighs, and splays her hand on his chest a bit lower, perfectly placed to measure Sherlock’s impending hyperventilation. “Stressful,” her mouth stretches wide with a yawn: “Tired.”

The speed with which Sherlock tears himself from Mary’s embrace and launches himself to his feet is unprecedented.

“What are you doing?” he demands. Mary blinks at him owlishly. John’s still muttering as he rubs the shoulder he apparently banged against the table on his way down.

“Why are you _here_?” Sherlock tries again, tries to keep the shrillness, the hysteria from his tone because no, no, they’re not meant to be here at all. “Your flight leaves this morning, at,” he whirls to find a clock somewhere, _somewhere_ : “God,” he runs a hand across his face, traces his lips in dismay: it’s late. It’s very late.

“Well,” he reasons, composes himself, takes in the facts and orders them accordingly. “I could call Mycroft, he owes me for missing yesterday. We might be able to get you there,” he darts about the room in search of his mobile. “He can delay the plane, declare a lockdown for international transit or whatnot.” He glances up from tapping on the screen to ask: “Do you have your bags?”

“Sherlock?” John asks as Sherlock waits inpatiently for the call to connect. He spent _months_ , and an infinite amount of composure, of inner resolve to make certain this wedding, and everything revolving around it, orbited in perfect time. There had been missteps, of course, hiccoughs in the waltz, but he’d managed, he’d _managed_.

He will be _damned_ if they miss their honeymoon. He will be damned if he’s died inside for nothing. 

It will be _worth_ it.

“John, it’s a simple question—” Sherlock sighs.

“Sherlock,” Mary interrupts, and god _damn_ his brother for not _answering_ the _phone_ —

“Mary, I don’t think you understand the time-sensitivity of the situation,” Sherlock bites out as he paces, listening for the ringing to end and starts running contingencies: “I can get you on a private jet to the Maldives, that’s fine, but if you miss your check-in at the Conrad—”

“Sherlock!” Mary’s the one who says it, so that’s where he looks.

Which means that he misses entirely the way that John marches up to him, grabs the phone from his hand and disconnects the call.

He opens his mouth to protest, because they cannot continue wasting _time_ , except that’s when he sees it, reads it.

John’s looking at him, and the glint in his eye is frantic, dilating and contracting like a heartbeat: dedicated and determined and devastated, or near-that, and Sherlock fears it. He doesn’t understand it.

He fears it.

And then there’s Mary: Mary, who considers him with a degree of tangible _care_ that catches in Sherlock’s chest and makes him feel as if the vitals parts of him, all the soft and essential components of his being, are in very real danger of just stopping, of catching fire and burning him to ash.

 _Ash_.

He’d had a lot to ponder, to think of, to say. About ash.

Last night.

He takes in John’s rumpled clothes, the gathered rheum at the corners of Mary’s eyes: last night.

Last night.

 _Precious ash_.

His heart trips as he sucks in a breath that feels acidic: that claws in his lungs.

Oh _god_.

“Sit down,” Mary tells him, pats the sofa next to her, gathers the skirt of her dress nearer around her thighs to clear the space, to invite him close.

He gapes at her.

“Please, just,” she pulls her body tighter, makes it smaller against against the side she occupies: offers him room, air, space, but asks him; begs: “sit down.”

He stares. He breathes.

He walks. He sits.

“How are you feeling, love?” she asks, reaching for him—not touching, not until he leans to her, unblinking, unhesitating: he leans to her, forms to her, and lets her wrap an arm around him and press her lips to his head as she holds. 

“Fine, I,” Sherlock’s breath comes sharp, unanticipated; he stumbles, and his heart pounds fierce: “Fine.”

“Right,” John, who’s seated next to him now on the opposite side, scoffs loudly, reaches for Sherlock’s wrist and Sherlock lets him, watches the frown on his face deepen as silence spreads, consumes.

“Sherlock,” John starts, “do you,” he pauses, seems stuck on something massive, something crucial: “remember, anything? From last night?”

John’s hand is still at Sherlock’s wrist; he feels it, undoubtedly, when Sherlock’s pulse falters— skips. 

And yet Sherlock cannot know how much of his memories are true, how much imagined: imposed. Sherlock cannot know what they’ve seen of him, or heard. He can guess all he wants, he can try to read it from their faces, and he thinks he could do it: could deduce them if he took the time, but to look at them too long, to see them in bright contrast and living flesh, to feel their _touch_ —it’s excruciating. It’s the wrath of an angry god.

Sherlock cannot know. And so he plays the only advantage he may have left.

“John, you know I never intended for a case to impinge on your wedding day,” Sherlock shams innocence, prays it’s truth: “And I swear to you, I did my very best to recover things at the reception—”

“Jesus, no, Sherlock,” John shakes his head, and he looks so very sad: “Not that.”

“Sherlock,” Mary cuts in, hand on the side of Sherlock’s neck, guiding: “Why did you leave early?”

John’s hand is gone from Sherlock’s skin, and the loss is tangible, palpable, but he’s glad for it, when the whole of him sinks, when his heart near sighs with the hurt of it, the vision of those lights and sounds, of dancing and the cold that’s never left him, never breaks away.

Mary is warm against him. Mary is warm, and he has to remind himself that it’s a lie; it will not last.

He wants to reach. 

“People,” he forces out with as little inflection as he can. “Not really my area.”

He forces his lips to quirk: he knows it’s barely a grimace, but it suits well enough.

Mary’s expression in return is full of anguish; damn near heartbreaking, if Sherlock had a heart still left to break.

“Did you even get to dance?” she asks, and the sting in his eyes is not something he can ignore much longer.

“You love dancing,” John breathes next to him, and Sherlock starts when John’s hand moves to cover his own. “You told me so,”

“Needed to get back to London,” Sherlock shrugs, and he forces himself, wills himself to shake John’s touch, to shake Mary’s as well, because he can’t—he won’t last much longer. “Work on a ca—”

“Sherlock,” Mary smiles, but it’s not a smile: it’s wreathed in a sadness that comes from a great depth. “You know you can’t lie to me.”

There is a deadening that takes place, a resignation. There’s a hard keen of his lungs and a feeble seize of his heart—there’s no turning back. 

If he thought he knew loss, before, he knows that this will be a privation he could never have anticipated.

This will be beyond even _his_ solutions; his capacity to solve.

“Did something happen?” Mary prompts, gently. “Or was it just…” 

She trails, and at first he can’t see why.

And then he feels her hand on his back, steadying; and John’s fingers at his wrist again, counting, and the likelihood that they’re both trembling erratically, yet in identical intervals is miniscule at best.

Eliminate the impossible—

“Oh, Sherlock,” Mary whispers, tries to soothe as he shakes, as he tries to stop the shaking but it is beyond the mind: transport, the treasonist. He cannot grasp and hold. 

“Oh, darling,” Mary breathes against his hair; “please, please, just,” and she sounds so desperate, she sounds so sincere, and it chips at what’s left of his resolve to endure: it makes him wonder if he’s signed a warrant, a suicide pact: this may kill him.

To see this, to be with them, to watch as they thrive and to burst at the joy of it, to burst and have nothing to fill with again, to be empty, to be discarded, to forever be outside and apart just as he knows his shape, just as he can envision with perfect clarity where he fits and how—

That may do what the running, what the substances, what the psychopaths and the sleepless nights and all the arch nemeses of the world at large could not accomplish.

Caring is not an advantage.

The heart should never rule the head.

How quickly he’s forgotten; how willingly he’s cast such wisdom aside. 

Fool.

“What can I do?” Mary sighs, and it’s so heavy, so laden with things he cannot bring himself to parse, to read.

She can love him. She can hold him. She can promise him forever.

She can leave him to wallow, to shatter entirely, in _peace_.

“Tea,” he rasps, “please.”

He needs something to grasp, something to hold. 

He needs a thing to latch to that will _stay_.

She watches him for a moment, for a series of breaths.

“I can do that,” she tells him softly, and she kisses his hand, lets her fingers linger in his, trail as she stands, as she walks until his arm falls limp: he doesn’t know what she wants.

He doesn’t know what it means.

“Sherlock,” and suddenly, there is heat against his side, and when he turns, John has his lip between his teeth, looks about to face an executioner, bound and chained. “I,” John breathes in, straightens, steels himself from the spine. “Look, I don’t—”

And when he meets Sherlock’s eyes, when Sherlock meets his, he pauses, stops, falters, and Sherlock loves him.

Dear _god_ , Sherlock loves this man, and perhaps he deserves the hell of aimless wanting, for having overlooked it, for having underestimated this need, this ache, for so long.

“What I mean, is,” John tries again, clears his throat: looks away, and Sherlock feels the wrench of it acutely. 

“I need to know, Sherlock,” and Sherlock knows what’s coming before indeed it comes: knows, because John’s eyes trail to the table before them—empty, cleared, but Sherlock knows what was there, Sherlock knows what he’d placed there, glittering, to remind him, to focus him, to taunt him and bait him and renew his resolve: and it’s then that he knows without doubt that he’s given himself away, gave himself away entirely. He knows that the visions in his mind of the night prior weren’t merely visions.

They missed their reception.

They missed their wedding night.

Sherlock swallows bile willfully: he is a wretched man. A fiend.

They need to make the break, now, and clean, else he’ll cling like this, violent and selfish and horrible. He’ll never let them be.

He’d intended his vow to be heartfelt, to be giving. That’s what he’d _meant_ , goddamnit. 

“What were you trying to do last night?” John whispers, and there’s enough fear in it to call to Sherlock, to signal him: to pull him back.

Oh. _Oh_.

“John,” Sherlock murmurs, low, because that name will forever be sweet on his tongue. “John, no, I—”

He shakes his head, and tells his brain to piss off, just for the moment, just for these few breaths where he reaches and folds John’s hands between his own, and oh, how they fit.

“Just a reset,” Sherlock reassures him, though John eyes him, skeptical. 

“A reset?”

“A,” Sherlock swallows hard, tries to think of words that will ease the fear of harm, of destruction beyond even Sherlock’s desires: that will circumvent the truth that he’d snapped, that the bones of him had given way and he’s grateful, yes, that he lasted through the ceremony, through the first dance, his duties fulfilled, but he hadn’t expected it. He’d been blindsided, and he doesn’t know if it was inevitable, or if it was the shudder that consumed him, that shook him to the core as they moved from him, as they walked away, that broke him: he doesn’t know.

Doesn’t know the catalyst, precisely. Doesn’t need to.

One equation that he’ll never balance; best not to try.

“A recalibration, if you will. I’d,” Sherlock tries to couch the truth in ambiguity as best he can: “I anticipated a course of events that have since shifted,” he tells John, relates cold data as if it doesn’t cut him, as if he takes no part. “I needed to compensate accordingly.”

John stares at him, unblinking, and what hurts perhaps the most—maybe it’s the worst; maybe it simply takes him by surprise: but what hurts perhaps the most is that he can’t read that face he holds so dear, cannot fathom what is going through John’s mind.

“I never meant,” Sherlock tries, “I never wanted you to—” but he has a sudden sense of certainty that nothing he can say will fit, will matter either way. 

“You shouldn’t have come,” he finally breathes, and John blinks at him, a frown darkening his features.

“I wouldn’t have,” Sherlock nods toward the empty space on the table—they both know what he means. “I’ve managed this long.”

And that’s where John speaks, or else, where a sound escapes John that resonates, violent and wrathful and utterly tortured, and if Sherlock could have one wish in that moment, it would be not to have John as his own, to keep him always: it would be never to hear that sound come from that mouth, that torment to be felt in that soul.

Not ever.

“How could you,” John huffs out, breathless, and it’s a trembling sound, which catches in Sherlock’s chest all the deeper, all the more hateful. 

“It was a lapse in judgement, John,” Sherlock scrambles, tries to make it right. “And I wouldn’t have,” he takes John’s hands in his own again, and he knows his eyes are wide, hopes they beg as deeply as the heart in him, as fully as he breathes. 

“I made a vow,” he whispers, hisses with a strength he doesn’t feel, just then; but a strength that he _believes_ : “I don’t take that lightly.”

And when John shakes his head, slow at first until a laugh escapes him, twisted and filled with sorrow, Sherlock feels something fracture at his centre: he is not wanted, but neither is his promise, and that, _that_ —

“Sherlock, I,” John rasps, and it’s only then that Sherlock sees the sheen in those eyes: “ _How_ could you think we wouldn’t come?”

Sherlock’s mouth opens to respond, to plead before he hears the words, before they make any sense.

Once the sense sinks in, though, Sherlock’s world grinds to a halt.

“And maybe, maybe you don’t yet know enough of Mary,” John forges on as Sherlock stares, blinks: flips his hands in Sherlock’s hold and grasps at Sherlock instead, grounds him as Sherlock’s heart starts to pound heavy, deep. 

“But goddamnit, Sherlock, how could you think _I_ wouldn’t?” 

John squeezes Sherlock’s palms together, tight, and his eyes are so earnest Sherlock thinks he might break. 

This can’t, this _can’t_ be—

“I love you, idiot,” John tells him, and Sherlock searches every crevice in the face that is his heart for the lie in it, for the half-truth, the love but not like that: he searches.

He finds nothing.

He must be broken, more splintered than he had supposed, unless—

John pulls Sherlock tight against his chest and Sherlock’s breath catches on impact. The pace of his blood is a painful thing, but to feel John’s just as frantic through the skin is a joy he never anticipated, yet often dreamed to know.

“Of course,” John chokes against Sherlock’s cheek; “of course I would come. I will always come and find you.”

John pulls back and looks Sherlock square in the eye: Sherlock feels his eyes widen, as if they know he needs to breathe this, to take it all in. 

“I let you step off a ledge once, Sherlock, and it broke my fucking heart,” John rasps. “Can you imagine how confusing it is, to be so angry, so hurt by the charade and yet never be so fucking grateful for a lie in your life?” 

Sherlock can imagine that; Sherlock can imagine many things.

Sherlock is a bit terrified he’s imaging this, just now: John close, John’s touch, the warmth of John’s breath—the scent of him.

Near.

“The last time I let you walk away, and didn’t follow, it nearly killed me,” John breathes against the corner of Sherlock's mouth, and it sends a thrill through him, a shiver for its warmth, it's improbable, ineffable depth. “I’ll be damned if I do that again."

And Sherlock wants more than anything, to turn his head just so, to line his face with John's and press his lips to that skin, that mouth, to tell John that he only survived those years on the promise of seeing one person, on the promise of saving one soul, and god, had Sherlock known he'd lose his own soul in the process from the beginning, for John? 

It would have been a trade he'd willingly take.

He wants, and he damn near takes, but the aroma of the tea precedes Mary's return.

“Has it been like this, since you came back?” she asks softly—a touch cryptic—as she hands him a cup.

He eyes her, uncomprehending. She sips her tea and watches him closely, careful. 

“Longer?”

He blinks. He doesn't understand. 

“Your hand shakes,” she says staring, and indeed, his right hand is trembling, threatening to upend his tea. He makes to steady it with his left hand around the wrist, but then Mary is reaching, and John as well, and when they touch—

When they touch, he stills. He settles.

His heart skips at the sensation of it, at the image burned against his retinas now, of their hands on him, of both their touches united on his flesh: skips, and then hums, and he prays against all deities that the hope there, deep in his chest, taking root: he prays that it's not unfounded.

He prays that what hurt he has, has traced his limits; flayed him wide enough for now.

“Talk to us, darling,” and he realises that his eyes have closed, that his body is tense for the fear of losing. He opens his eyes, and finds Mary, finds John. 

Memorises them, for when it's over.

“We can’t help if we don’t know what’s wrong,” John exhales ardently, raising Sherlock's palm, the very centre of it, to the swell of his lips and oh.

 _Oh_. 

“It’s nothing,” Sherlock stammers, breathless, and it's self preservation, nothing more; it's out before he can process anything deeper, anything more daring.

But there is a piece of him, and it's gaining density by the second—there is a piece of him that wants to give, wants to trust.

Wants to wear his adoration wrapped long like the collar of his coat, the soft drape of his dressing gown: close to him, all consuming, and seen. Known.

Undeniable. The heart burned, but undaunted.

He wants, but he can't. 

He doesn't know how. 

“Damnit, Sherlock,” John winces, and for all the frustration and the veiled anger in the words, it seems, against all odds, they're not meant for him, not directed toward Sherlock for his inadequacy, his inability to reach.

But that's not right. That's not how it works. 

He doesn't _understand_.

“We solved it, you see,” Mary tells him, gathers his hands now to her chest in earnest, and Sherlock can feel it, the way she wants him to realise, to _know_. “We didn’t before, but now," she dips her chin and kisses the tips of his fingers. It's oddly intimate; it makes his throat burn.

“And I was wrong, Sherlock,” and when she draws him close enough to press their brows together, she lets one hand trail, cup his cheek and to his horror, his joy, his utter mortification: he leans into her. He leans into her like the world is crumbling and she is the only shore. 

“I was wrong when I said a thing is more solvable when it matters,” she whispers against him, “because it always mattered. _You’ve_ always mattered.”

“We’re just not quite so luminous as you,” she tells him, a soft smile curving her lips as she strokes the line of his jaw, and he’d never deserved John, but he knows, he _knows_ : for all that he never expected this, expected _her_ —never anticipated the rush of pure warmth at her smile, the impulse to please her, to make her laugh; to give her wonder, bring her joy—he knows that he needs her. Knows that he values her, cares for her: holds her, against all probability, impossibly close in his heart.

“And it’s never mattered more,” John says from beside him, a hand on his arm, and Sherlock cannot fight the way his body betrays him, the way he goes limp into the feel of them, their hold: he starts to shake against his will, and the pressure behind his eyes builds to blinding.

“It was horrible, wasn’t it?” Mary whispers to him, and her body rocks softly, sways, and Sherlock swallows the embarrassment of swaying with her, rhythmic, where he cannot swallow the sob that starts to build. “When you were away? What you had to do?”

He gasps, trembles, and that’s answer enough.

They embrace him all the closer.

“And you couldn’t rest, couldn’t stop,” Mary murmurs, low. “There was no reprieve, was there? You could never let your guard down.”

He couldn’t, he couldn’t risk, and it was hard, so much harder than he’d ever expected, than he could ever have steeled himself against, and there were nights he wants to delete and can’t; there were so many days that he did not recognise his own reflection—he remembers his breath as shallow, remembers his mind as fragmented, remembers his heart as sore for its pounding and his limbs overstretched, overtaxed: he doesn’t know how he came back. He doesn’t know if he wants to know.

He’s been teetering on the ledge of a great chasm since he teetered off the ledge of Bart’s.

“How did you do it?” John asks him, breath warm against Sherlock’s ear, chest solid, real against Sherlock’s spine. “How could you have done that for two _years_ , Sherlock?”

Sherlock swallows hard, twice, and still his voice wavers, breaks. 

“I, I told myself,” he breathes, and if John’s hand comes around to his chest, hold him steady, rises along with his breath, it helps. Sherlock doesn’t know why it helps, just that it does; just that John _always_ does.

“Just get back,” he says in a rush: “Finish. Make sure there are no loose ends,” and the mantra of it, the demand he’s placed upon his own self, the punishments he’d enacted on body and mind to ensure it, to keep himself going: he winces, because he deleted them, but he knows, he knows now what he can no longer deny.

Deletion’s a kind term for a self-deception that consumes.

“Just get back,” Sherlock hisses through the strain of his vocal cords, the way his throat closes up. “You can,” and his hands starts to shake, to seize; “Once it’s done,” and Mary’s hand laces into his immediately, stroking the knuckles, lending him strength. 

“But you didn’t,” Mary picks up where his voice fails him, where the heart of him threatens to give way.

“Sherlock,” she strokes his cheek again, and it’s only then that he realises his face is wet, he’s failed to maintain, failed to control even that last shred of his composure, this facade: and yet Mary doesn’t shame him, Mary doesn’t sneer. Mary holds him, Mary soothes him, and John’s chest is still pressed tight against his back; John’s hands are still held close against his heart.

 _Perhaps_ —

“Sherlock, you’ve been holding yourself together by threads, love. But you’re here, now. You’re safe,” Mary coaxes his chin up to look at him, the question bright inside her eyes: “Why didn’t you let yourself _breathe_ again?”

He wants, in those moments, to lie. And yet there is nothing left to build falsehoods upon. He is stripped to the core, to the soul, and of all great ironies: the soul of Sherlock Holmes is absolutely true.

“I am not,” he starts, looks away from him. “I do not have a history of easily picking myself up once I’ve fallen.”

He sighs; smiles grim.

“Much better not to fall.”

“The wedding, then,” John’s voice is steeped in revelation—heartbroken—as he tenses against Sherlock, but doesn’t pull away.

“Instead of coming home, that being the goal,” Mary follows the logical course, marveling: pained. “You pushed yourself through the wedding. You put us, before you.”

He would hold them, these two, above anything.

Anyone.

“Sherlock, it’s only a wedding,” Mary tells him, all the love and the pain of him shining in her, through her, and he doesn’t know how to quantify this, any of it. He doesn’t know how to make it compatible with the facts of his existence.

Love. For _him_.

Empathy. For _him_.

Sherlock shakes his head.

“Biggest and most important day of—”

“Jesus, Sherlock,” John flinches against him, incredulous; “Of all the times for your to take what I say to heart.”

Sherlock glances over his shoulder, takes in the beautiful half-sight of John’s sandy head bowed close against his frame. 

“I take everything you say to heart,” he breathes, because John is the heart: of couse.

And Mary, Mary could, maybe is—

He breathes.

He cannot continue to fool himself. He cannot be so selfish.

He _promised_.

The one and only vow.

“You have a honeymoon to enjoy,” he says with all the steadiness, all the clipped sterility of uninvested fact that he can assume, can feign, because they are an entity, and he merely intersects with them in passing. 

He makes to extricate himself, tells his heart to stay calm, his breathing steady: resigns himself on the promise of dark, of still, of solitude so as to reacclimate, to remember what alone is, how it moves.

He makes to extricate himself, but the bodies around his own refuse the pull.

“Come with us,” Mary says, and it’s not an offer, really. It’s not a question so much as a command given with such affection, such want and care that Sherlock doesn’t know what to term it, what word best fits the way his chest sees fit to seize. 

“I’m not overly fond of tropical climates,” he protests, but it’s weak.

“Then we’ll go somewhere else,” John speaks against the base of his neck, and John’s lips—John’s _lips_ are a godsend, a gift.

“We’ve cocked this up good and proper, haven’t we?” Mary exhales, draws his head to fit, to bow and settles and collide against her chest, to tuck him close beneath her chin, and he sighs, fuck, but he sighs into it, he _needs_ , and the beat of her heart is a balm to the whole of him when she murmurs, the rustle of the words magnetic as they shiver through her:

“I thought you knew, Sherlock,” she shivers, laments, begs a forgiveness she does not need because she’s done no wrong: “I thought you knew, I swear.”

“Fuck, Sherlock,” John mouths against his shoulder, and Sherlock curses his shirt for the barrier is creates; curses fate and the universe for the fact that this is temporary; fleeting. “It was only now, since you’ve been,” and whatever is left still to fracture in Sherlock, it does precisely that when John’s voice cracks on the loss, on the memory. 

“It’s only since you’ve been back,” John recovers, voice small, “that I thought you’d ever want anything said, anything shown,” John shifts to press against him impossibly closer, opens his palm wide against Sherlock’s chest as he lays his head soft, drained against Sherlock’s shoulder blades, and breathes.

“But you were,” John stammers, “we were—”

“I thought you understood,” Mary picks up, a little breathless, and the sound of her voice through her body is something marvelous, something Sherlock never thought to want to praise. 

“You see everything, Sherlock,” she huffs what may have been a laugh, elsewhere, at another time, save that it catches like a sob. “God, I thought you saw this from the start.”

And Sherlock wants to sob himself, wants to fall to pieces between them so that they are honour-bound to keep him, to save him now—to takes what’s broken and help him learn to make it whole. 

He is selfish, he is _selfish_ —

“Sherlock,” Mary whispers; “Sherlock, look at me.”

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to give in to the lies, the hope he’ll see there: the hope that cannot _last_.

“Sherlock.”

The way she says his _name_ ; it’s not a thing he’s ever known.

He looks to her.

She smiles.

“Do you love my husband, Sherlock?”

Sherlock’s lack of a gasp is countered by the way John holds his breath against Sherlock’s neck: the way he must, the way he _has_ to feel Sherlock’s heart speed unending.

It’s an answer they both see, that they both know.

_More than my life. More than any death._

Mary’s smile widens, but there’s a touch of apprehension, now, that makes no sense. Sherlock finds he wants to wipe it clean, take it from her.

“Do you more than tolerate me?”

Sherlock blinks at her, and his chest tightens within the space of a breath.

“Tolerate you?” he gapes, half-appalled. “Mary,” he breathes, “I—”

John moves, then, leans around to watch his face, but suddenly, Sherlock is less aware of the body behind him, is less aware of anything that isn’t Mary Elizabeth Watson: her warmth, her depth, her intrigue, her patience, her humour, her joy, her softness, and the subtle tinge of fear she keeps as she looks to him, awaiting his answer.

He understands, suddenly, what it must have been like for them, if they’re telling him true: to think, to be absolutely _sure_ that someone knows a thing they doubt. 

“I think,” Sherlock murmurs, and now it’s him cupping Mary’s face, and relishing, marveling at the way she turns into him, the way her eyes slide closed and she nuzzles into his palm. 

“I think I love you, too, Mary.”

She sighs, a full-body thing that settles something through the whole of her frame, and Sherlock’s heart his pounding, buzzing, because this feels real, somehow, suddenly.

This feels— _more_.

“Sherlock,” Mary breathes his name out, choked, but she’s _beaming_ , and it makes Sherlock so warm, because the evidence is almost impossible to deny: he gave her that smile.

He loves her, and that is the cause of her joy.

Unfathomable.

More addictive than anything he’s ever known.

“You have to understand,” Mary pats his hands, voice strained and eyes watering: “we didn’t plan this, either.”

“I never dreamt that things would play out the way they have, the way they are,” John tells him, and that’s warm too: the perfect outline of John against him—the way it hasn’t shifted, hasn’t left him: the way that Sherlock doesn’t have to force himself to remember it, to savour it against the loss, because the loss is still awaited; his skin cannot forget.

“The way they _might_ ,” John adds, and he sounds hopeful.

Sherlock’s heart dares, _dares_ to _think_ to soar.

“I don’t know the first thing about this,” John confesses, and Sherlock fights the urge to shake with glorious, terrible possibility, with the whisper of _maybe_ , of _might_. “I mean, that’s obvious, given the bang up job we’ve done so far,” John laughs softly, self-deprecating. “But I don’t know how this works. I haven’t learned.”

“But I want to,” John tells him, moves him so that he’s between them, now; so that he faces forward and they press against him from either side, and when John folds into him, moulds Sherlock’s to the shape of him, it is bliss, it is death come just in time. “I want to learn.”

Oh. Oh, but Sherlock feels _light_.

“We both do,” Mary tells him, heartfelt, eyes wide.

“God, Sherlock,” John breathes into his hair. “I never thought this would,” he murmurs, trails off—choked; “but you…”

“We want you,” Mary says with purpose, with a sense of deep desire Sherlock doesn’t know if he’s built to contain. 

“I’ve wanted you since I killed a man to keep you with me,” John whispers, straining; and it cuts Sherlock just as it makes him feel infinite.

“I’ve wanted you since you smiled and told me you hadn’t a clue about human nature,” Mary smiles at him; “even as your eyes told me otherwise.”

Sherlock doesn’t remember how to make his voice work, just then. Sherlock doesn’t recall how the human heart pumps, save for the fact that it can: terrifyingly swift and strong. 

“Do,” John starts, swallows, and his eyes shine with an echo of trepidation. “Do you want us, Sherlock?”

Sherlock gasps, and his eyes sting, and his heart damnably _leaps_ as he bends to kiss John’s lips, to draw him close and taste him, to _breathe_ him wholly and without restraint.

“I love you,” John gasps against Sherlock’s lips; “God, I love you.”

And Sherlock’s eyes are blurred with feeling when he pulls away; his lips are sore with the stretch of his smile; his chest aches with the press of his gasps and his pulse as he draws back, as he looks at John as if he’s a miracle, as if he is proof of the universe at large.

He turns to Mary, who is watching them with a love Sherlock doesn’t, cannot believe is meant to blanket him in any way.

He turns to Mary, and watches her face, asks with his eyes before he leans to her, before he takes her mouth and savours the flavour of her lips, just as sweet.

She sighs, hums against him, and it is divine.

“And _I_ love you,” Mary breathes against him, says with the kind of passion Sherlock’s never been able to understand, still cannot grasp even as he finds himself consumed with it. “I can’t imagine what the future looks like anymore, without you there.”

“And I cannot tell you how sorry I am,” Mary whispers, tucks her head in the crook of Sherlock’s neck. “That you didn’t know. That you weren’t sure, so absolutely sure of what you are to me, to us,” and John grasps his hand and draws it to his lips, then—mouths promise and affection and need into the lines of Sherlock’s palm. “That you weren’t certain enough to stay, and know we’d come for you.”

“I’ll always come,” John speaks against Sherlock’s wrist, the pulse. “ _We’ll_ always come for you,” he swears it: “No matter what happens, Sherlock. _Always_.”

Sherlock cannot stop it any longer: he trembles uncontrollably; his breaths shudder; heave. His cheeks grow wet.

He breaks. He breaks beneath the force of impossible joy.

Of _course_

“You’re as necessary to this now as either one of us,” Mary whispers, gathering him close. “Because you are necessary to _both_ of us, and whatever we might have had apart from you is nothing if John and I are broken.”

“I’d never be the man she calls her husband without you,” John confesses with a tremulous smile, and it’s a needy one, somehow: it’s one that _asks_.

“I wouldn’t want to be called his wife,” Mary tells the beat of Sherlock’s heart in his neck; “if it meant either of us having to give you up along the way.”

The breath Sherlock draws in, then, is shivering, is wracked with something fierce that has the power to destroy him utterly; the power to make him whole.

“Look at me,” John speaks, and Sherlock looks.

Cannot look away.

“I’ve made many vows, in my life,” John breathes out, hoarse. “Some more important than others. Some more lasting. But let me tell you, Sherlock Holmes,” and John takes Sherlock’s hands in his own, and Sherlock’s breath stalls, because these are the hands, this is the vow, this is what he gave at an altar not one day prior: this is the posture and the tone and the depth.

And god, oh _god_ , can it really be his?

“I promise you,” John tells him, stares straight in his eyes: “with everything I am, that I will be here for you. Always. I won’t ever make the choice to leave you, do you understand?”

“Everything you promised us,” Mary says, folding hands around theirs, sealing the vow: “We thought it was a given that you’d know it’s all returned,” she tells him, ardent and true. “Returned twofold, love,” she breathes out: “with full hearts.”

“Let us help you,” Mary whispers, half-pleads as she grasps, takes Sherlock’s hand, his right hand, and traces the digits, careful as Sherlock’s breath sticks in his throat. 

“Let us take care of you,” she asks of him; asks for him to ask it of himself: “Let us _love_ you like you deserve.”

Like he deserves.

Like he _deserves_.

His chest, he feels; his ribs cannot contain this, cannot withstand _this_.

“Can we then, Sherlock?” John asks him, eyes bright, the perfect blue. “Will you let me call you mine? Let us call you ours?”

He feeds his fingers between Sherlock’s, and between them, Mary and John, they encircle him; they protect him and make for him a space to be weary, to bleed and be held and be safe.

 _Loved_.

Dear _god_.

“Will you call us yours, just the same?” John prompts, when he doesn’t speak.

Sherlock gasps, because his breath is thin, is fleeting, and he can only nod and clutch at them; can only hope that they understand: it’s all he wants.

To be theirs. For them to be his own.

“What happens now?” he asks, barely a breath, as soon as he can.

“Now?” Mary murmurs, toying with his hair. “Now, you’re going to sit here, while I put something together that passes for a meal,” she stands slowly, arranges him carefully against John so that there is not a single moment where he is not held, not kept: deliberate. “And then we’re going to have a lie down.”

“We’ve only just got up,” Sherlock protests weakly, his voice crackling and faint; Mary rolls her eyes fondly, and promptly ignores him. 

“And _then_ we’re going to start facing this head on,” she bends to kiss his knuckles, to stroke the hand that shakes, and to show it care, to show him care for all the ways he is broken: to show love to all of his cracks. “We’re going to start working through this,” she pledges to him, an oath from the very heart in her: “Together.”

She lets him go, and somehow, unthinkably, he doesn’t doubt that she’ll return.

“I can,” Sherlock turns to John, then and stammers, entirely drained, but needing, _needing_ to be sure: “I could still get you to the Maldives.”

John smiles, and pulls Sherlock close to him again, and Sherlock goes, Sherlock gives, Sherlock _melts_. 

“You’re not much for beaches,” John exhales into his hair, and Sherlock’s never felt so warm, so safe.

“What would you say to Sussex?” 

Sherlock stills, uncertain: “Sussex?”

“Mmm,” John hums, kisses Sherlock’s head. “Quiet. Some time away. Maybe you can relax, a bit of breathing room. Maybe you can give us both the dance we’d been hoping for,” John noses against Sherlock’s curls, so heart-wrenchingly affection, intimate, familiar. 

“Maybe we can start to chart all this,” John breathes out: “figure out how this runs, where we stand, what we want.”

Sherlock stills, heart flinching: fearful. He knows, he _knows_ what he wants, and maybe he’s misread—

“The details, love,” Mary runs fingers through her hair as she comes, sits, and place a plate on the table before she curls around him, covers his body where John’s body leaves off. “Not the big picture,” she assures him with lips against his temple. “That’s long since been done and dried.”

“S’long as I’ve known you,” John agrees, “That’s been set in stone. You,” he laughs, that sad laugh that twists at Sherlock’s soul. “So long as you were breathing, and hell,” John pauses, mouth against Sherlock’s skin as if to steady, as if to make absolutely _sure_ : “Even when I thought you’d stopped, there was never a future for me that didn’t have you.”

Sherlock feels the tears when they fall from his lashes; tastes them—exquisite, somehow. Sorrow and burning light.  
He shudders, and he winds his arms around them both, pulls them close in kind and they come to him.

They come as if they want nothing else, nothing more.

“Mine,” Sherlock chokes out, sobs; “God,” he breathes, and somehow, he feels as if breathing was never what he’d done, never what he’d known, because this novel, this is _sheer_.

“ _Mine_ ,” he rasps, and and his tears are like diamonds, like glass against Mary’s hair as they fall there, as she curls into his chest and he holds her; as John wraps around him and keeps him, their hands held tight.

His inhales, and his heart trills, and the feel of their smiles—watery, too—pressed into his skin at the neck, at the base of the throat: the feeling of their joy sends a rapture through him, stretches the bones of him and taxes, overruns his mind, his body, the whole of himself.

He can hardly catch his breath. He can hardly hold them close enough.

Yet inexplicably, the promise of them, the presence: it’s steady. His pulse, his world, his hands.

They make him steady.

Sherlock drifts in joy. In warmth.

And for the moment, he does not fear what’s next.


End file.
